In Andrew Myles’ guest post (Convergence and Competition - A Tale of Two Standards Part 4 - Guest Post by Andrew Myles), he discussed the six companies that have failed to provide a formal response to ISO’s request to confirm whether or not they will grant a FRAND license for their Wi-Fi 6 SEPs. It’s time to take a deeper dive into some of those six companies. To remind you, those six companies are:
· Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (“Huawei,” based out of China),
· Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (“Ericsson,” based out of Sweden),
· Nokia Technologies Oy (“Nokia,” based out of Finland),
· InterDigital Holdings, Inc. (“Interdigital” based out of the USA),
· Panasonic Corporation (“Panasonic,” based out of Japan),
· Koninklijke KPN N.V. (“KPN,” based out of the Netherlands).
And since this occasional series is about the increasing competition between the Wi-Fi and cellular standards, including for the hearts, minds and dollars of the IoT market (see Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 3 (The IoT Market)), I’ll be taking a look at these company’s participation in both standards. Today we are looking at Huawei.
Huawei is the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world. Huawei is also the largest (or second largest depending on who is counting) holder of patents essential (or claimed to be essential) to both the Wi-Fi 6 standard and to the 5G cellular standard.
Despite Huawei’s success in the marketplace, Huawei has had a very checkered history. Way back in 2003, after Huawei entered the U.S. market, it was sued by a U.S. company for theft of trade secrets and unlawful copying of source code and other materials. That lawsuit was eventually settled before trial but, a decade later, another U.S. based company won a jury verdict against Huawei that found that Huawei had committed industrial espionage in the U.S. by stealing that U.S. company’s trade secrets.[1] In 2012, the United States (and several other countries) told service providers that they should not use Huawei’s products in their networks based on concerns that Huawei’s products had deliberate security flaws that allowed the Chinese government to spy on other governments and companies and had engaged in a “pattern of illegal behavior . . . [including] fraud, bribery, copyright infringement, and immigration violations, among others.”[2]
During his first term in office, President Trump barred the U.S. government from purchasing equipment from Huawei due to national security concerns. The United States also began a criminal investigation of Huawei under President Trump. This was followed up by the addition of Huawei to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List in 2019 during President Trump’s first administration. This restricted Huawei’s ability to do business with U.S. companies.[3] As a result, the IEEE banned Huawei from participating in Wi-Fi and other standard setting and the Wi-Fi Alliance paused Huawei’s membership.
More recently, a number of EU countries (and others) have followed the US lead and curbed or banned the use of certain Huawei equipment because of security concerns.[4] Despite these bans, Huawei remains the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world (based on revenue) and “still dominates [the] telecommunications equipment market.”[5]
Huawei and the Cellular Standards
Huawei makes products that implement the 802.11 standard but its largest revenue source are products that implement cellular standards. Huawei makes cell phones and is the world’s largest supplier of cellular base stations.[6] Cellular base stations are the backbone of cellular communications - they are the equipment that runs every cell tower. Base stations provide the ability for the network connected to that cell tower to communicate with cell phones. See The Cellular Multiverse for a longer discussion of how base stations fit in the cellular multiverse.
Huawei also is the world’s largest holder of patents declared essential to the 5G cellular standard.[7] Huawei clearly has a very significant interest in the success of the 5G rollout. But, despite its large scale participation in the 802.11 working group (see below), its business interest in the success of Wi-Fi 6 is less easy to quantify. I mean this literally: in its recent reports, Huawei does not break out how much revenue it receives from products that implement Wi-Fi standards.
Huawei and the Wi-Fi Standard
The IEEE and the Wi-Fi Alliance bans did not last long.[8] Within about a year, the IEEE and the Wi-Fi Alliance had each lifted its ban/suspension and Huawei was again allowed to participate in IEEE Wi-Fi standard setting. And participate Huawei has since then, sending ever increasing numbers of employees to meetings of the IEEE’s 802.11 working group (“WG”). In my earlier sampling of IEEE meeting minutes, Huawei did not have a single attendee at the plenary WG meeting held in March, 2010 (or before then as far as I can tell), but had 49 attendees (across various related entities), more than any other company, in attendance at the March, 2023 plenary meeting.[9]
According to more recent IEEE information, the current number of 802.11 WG participants that are affiliated with Huawei dwarfs those of every other entity. According to that information, Huawei has 66 current voting members of the 802.11 working group, 11 aspirant voters, 1 ex officio and 2 potential voters. Futurewei (a Huawei affiliated company) also has a couple of voting members not included in the Huawei numbers. By comparison, Qualcomm, the company with the next largest number of participants, has only 40 current voting members, 2 potential voters and 3 aspirants.[10]
Huawei currently holds a Vice-Chair position in the 802.11 WG and has held other leadership roles in the last several years.[11]
According to one source, Huawei is the world’s largest holder of Wi-Fi 6 SEPs.12] In May of 2019, Huawei submitted a negative Letter of Assurance to the IEEE which stated that it would NOT agree to license any of its patents that were essential to practice the 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The negative LoA also covered the 802.11ay, aj and ba versions of the standard.[13] That same month, Huawei sent 26 people to the 802.11 WG meeting.[14]
Huawei itself claims to have made “very significant contributions” to Wi-Fi 6 both by injecting 5G technology into the Wi-Fi standard (thereby driving convergence) and by adding “Huawei specific improvements” to the standard.[15]
Huawei vs. Netgear
In 2022, Huawei, a Chinese based-company, filed a patent lawsuit against Netgear, Inc., an American based company, in Germany. Huawei alleged that Netgear was infringing a number of Huawei’s Wi-Fi 6 SEPs. That lawsuit was part of a larger campaign by Huawei against Wi-Fi 6 implementers.[16]
That same year, Huawei and Sisvel announced they had established a Wi-Fi 6 patent pool. According to Sisvel’s website, Sisvel was formed in 1982 to license patents for three Italian consumer electronics companies.[17] To this day, Sisvel remains a non-practicing entity that invents nothing, and does not make or sell any products. Instead, Sisvel is purely a licensing entity that has several licensing “programmes.” These programmes include “Mobile communications” (i.e. the various cellular standards), “IoT,” and “Wi-Fi.”[18]
Sisvel’s Wi-Fi 6 pool was not formed by the Wi-Fi industry. Instead, it primarily benefits Huawei but also includes three other top 25 (by number) Wi-Fi 6 SEP holders and a smattering of smaller SEP holders.[19] The Wi-Fi 6 specific pool includes two of the six ISO holdouts (Huawei and Panasonic). Notably, Sisvel has another Wi-Fi licensing pool, “Wi-Fi/W-LAN”, that includes another of the six ISO holdouts (Koninklijke KPN N.V.). This means that three of the six ISO holdouts have combined to license their claimed Wi-Fi SEPs through Sisvel.[20] Sisvel will become important to the end of this story about Huawei’s campaign against Wi-Fi implementer Netgear.
In 2023, Huawei filed another infringement suit against Netgear. This time, Huawei filed against Netgear in the European Unified Patent Court in Munich alleging infringement of Huawei’s patents that it claimed were essential to Wi-Fi 6.
Neither Huawei nor Netgear is headquartered in Germany, or in the European Union, and neither company has the bulk of their sales in Germany or the EU. Germany and the UPC in Munich is therefore a jurisdiction with no close connection to either party, or to the gravitas of the dispute. So why did Huawei chose to file in Germany and the UPC? Germany (and the German judge influenced UPC) is an outlier on the world stage because German judges seem unwilling to weigh fairness or equity before issuing injunctions on FRAND committed SEPs (see Answers to First Pop Quiz).
Netgear tried to defend itself by filing a lawsuit against Huawei in California (the state where Netgear is headquartered) alleging anti-competitive behavior and racketeering by Huawei and some of its subsidiaries with respect to Wi-Fi standard setting and SEP licensing practices.[21]
In response, the UPC issued an anti-anti suit injunction preventing Netgear from seeking an order from the California court that would have prevented the UPC from issuing an injunction. This is a shocking result given that the EU sued China in the World Trade Organization based, in part, on allegations that China’s issuance of anti-suit injunctions violates international law. (see First Pop Quiz Revisited - The EU Complaint Against China). Now the EU’s courts are doing exactly the same thing that the EU is complaining about in China.
Netgear is a small (compared to Huawei) telecommunications equipment maker whose business is based primarily on using the Wi-Fi standard in its products. Netgear is not on anyone’s top ten list of SEP holders, whether for Wi-Fi or for cellular. Netgear has no current voting members in the 802.11 WG. Nor does Netgear send participants to 3GPP to help develop cellular standards or to ETSI to vote on adoption of cellular standards.
In other words, the lawsuits filed by Huawei represent a very big player trying to stop a much smaller market participant from implementing a standard. Recall that Huawei had an oversized role in developing that standard and made “very significant contributions,” including “Huawei specific improvements.”
This David vs Goliath type battle did not end well for Netgear. After issuing its first ever anti-anti suit injunction, the UPC granted an injunction to Huawei against Netgear. The UPC found that Netgear’s failure to explain why a Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 pool license was not FRAND made Netgear an unwilling licensee with respect to Huawei’s case.[22] The injunction prevented Netgear from selling its products in seven EU countries. This was more than a small company like Netgear could withstand and it ultimately settled all of the lawsuits without any court every taking a good look at Huawei’s behavior.
And Netgear settled (or perhaps was forced to settle?) by taking a license to Sisvel’s entire pool of Wi-Fi 6 patents.
Conclusion
Huawei is the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker. It holds the number one/two position for both cellular SEPs and Wi-Fi 6 SEPs. It holds an executive position in the Wi-Fi working group and has a dominant position within that working group based on numbers of participants. You would think that when such an entity holds up the international adoption of the very standard to which it claims to have made “very significant contributions” or tries to prevent a small competitor from selling products based on that very standard, someone might question whether the behavior should be examined under the competition laws. Perhaps, as I’ve previously said, it is time to get back to basics (see Back to Basics – An Overview of Competition Law, Standard Development and Standard Setting).
[1] Huawei admits to a little copying - CNET; Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered With Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics - WSJ; Huawei spied, US federal jury finds • The Register
[2] Lawmakers to U.S. companies: Don't buy Huawei, ZTE - CNET and Huawei-ZTE Investigative Report (FINAL).pdf
[3] New law bans US gov’t from buying tech from Chinese giants ZTE and Huawei - Ars Technica and Tech stocks slide on US decision to blacklist Huawei and 70 affiliates | TechCrunch
[5] Huawei tops worldwide telecom equipme... - Mobile World Live and Huawei still dominates telecom equipment market | Fierce Network
[6] See Huawei Statistics By Revenue, Market Share and Facts [2025*] and Huawei is starting to look unstoppable
[8] [d] CEO DATELINE - Tech group lifts ban on Chinese company Huawei | CEO Update; the same happened in the Wi-Fi Alliance: HUAWEI kicked out of Wi-Fi Alliance (Update: Back now) - Android Authority
[9] See Is SEP Licensing Necessary to Encourage SEP Development - Part 2 and the sources cited there.
[10] IEEE 802.11 Members and see Voting Participation for an explanation of what aspirant and potential voter means.
[11] See https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/dcn/23/11-23-2061-01-0000-minutes-working-group-november-2023.docx and https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/dcn/24/11-24-1680-01-0000-minutes-working-group-november-2024.docx
[14] 11-19-0849-00-0000-minutes-working-group-may-2019.docx. Interestingly, alone of the six entities holding up international adoption of Wi-Fi 6 at ISO, a few months later, in July of 2019, Huawei gave a RAND commitment on Wi-Fi 6 (as well as 802.11aj but as far as I can find Huawei maintains its negative LoA on 802.11ay and ba). https://standards.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/import/governance/patcom/custom-loa-802_11ax-huawei-25July2019.pdf
[16] Huawei also filed a similar Wi-Fi 6 SEP lawsuit against Amazon, an American company, in Germany at around the same time and against other companies as well. Huawei successful against Amazon in dispute over wifi routers-Patent|EU|Judicial Development|China Intellectual Property Lawyers Network